Effective Management Techniques For Overcoming Conflict And Low Morale In The Workplace

Analyzing the Root Causes of Conflict in the Workplace

The globalizing world is bringing people from different businesses together and makes them work together for their own business purposes. Accounting organizations deal with different business professionals for their accounting solutions. While working with business professionals from different businesses, conflicts become part of their business. The occurrence of such conflicts in organizations while dealing with a variety of people is common. But at times such conflicts may cause a far-reaching negative impact on the organization and its business ethics as well. To manage such conflicts, an organization needs skilled and communicating managers to deal with such people having conflicts among themselves. Managers provided with a team of members having conflicts, have to deal with them very carefully (Le Fevre, and Robinson, 2015). In such cases, managers are responsible to resolve their conflicts and motivate them for the productive output from their efforts. This discussion is made to discuss a similar case of workplace conflicts in ABC services. Also, the discussion will discuss the academic solutions for the same and will make it easy for the organization to understand their problem along with providing efficient solutions as well.

In this case, the finance and accounting department of ABC service is consisting of six people who are working efficiently and meeting the company expectation into their work. Still, they have some morale problems as well as their personal conflicts among themselves. While dealing with such situation, managers play a critical role in dealing with the scenario and resolve the conflicts effectively to make their department work efficiently or in a more productive way. In the scenario, there are problems like low morale, higher than normal turnover and reluctant behavior with each other. In short, they are suffering from poor teamwork. Although they are working on different companies, they need to work as a team for the organization. This will be beneficial for the company as well as for themselves. Such a situation may be created due to a lack of effective leadership or poor management of managers while dealing with their team members. CEO of the company has addressed me about the leadership style of the previous manager who was not well respected or liked by the team members. Also, he told me that the managers had a directive but an impersonal leadership style. This approach didn’t work out and the conflicts remain the same for a long time. He wants me to deal with a different and more strategic approach to engage and motivate team members in a productive way as a team.

Effects of Low Morale and Turnover on Workplace Productivity

In the literature work on management, managers are recognized as the center of an organization’s achievements consequently, they must be effective in their job roles. However, the academic work has a lack of certainty prevails about what is essential for a manager to be effective. Management has been defined as involving a particular type of responsibilities focused on achieving the organizational objectives efficiently with the available resource in the form of a materialistic and human resource to the company (Ololube, 2013). Management styles are culturally contingent as these are perceptions of their respective effectiveness. Handrickson (2016), states that managers disregarding while intercultural interactions are more liable to affect their managerial effectiveness adversely. Leading a team with several conflicts and a low morale makes the management much more complex and challenging. The origin of employees’ conflicts is low morale and competition for scarce resources. Conflicts of competence may have positive outcomes as well but low morale conflicts among the employees always make them feel low and make a negative impact on their individual performance as well as the organization’s overall performance. This is because the moral is defined as an elusive quality that involves feelings, attitude, emotions, and individual’s perception of the organization and its objective goals. A low morale of people working in an organization may affect the other employees and create a negative energy at the workplace. Low morale can attribute to several factors like job insecurity, uncertain business conditions, lack of fair compensation, and sometimes results in excessive outsourcing (Meng, Yu, Ma, & Yang, 2018). Managerial behaviour is one of the root causes of low morale where managers communicate with their employees from a top-down command instead of a direct communication with employees. Such kind of communication avoiding an effective as well as motivating communication, direct with the employees results in a low morale of organization people (Chungsup, et al., 2012).  This kind of communication creating low morale results in a huge gap between managers and employees which leads to employee disrespect, distrust, low morale, and decreased motivation as well as. Low morale may also cause employees to lose their interest in teamwork and effective work especially when managers don’t communicate and appreciate effectively. Such impacts of low morale cause a high turnover that is disconcerting as it has the great implication of both the financial as well as productivity level (Rahim, 2017). Financial is in terms of hiring new employees, either with high recruitments expenses or with higher payments of salary. Along with this, at production level employees leaving the organization will take with them the knowledge, experience, and skills (Shaban, Al-Zubi, Ali, and Alqotaish, 2017).

The Role of Effective Management in Resolving Workplace Conflicts

In order to resolve these conflicts, motivation is the key element to retain and keep employees engaged with the organization (Shaban, Al-Zubi, Ali, and Alqotaish, 2017). At the beginning of 20^th century, researchers like Buchanan and Hueznski (2004), stated the definition of motivation as “the cognitive decision-making process with help of which a behavior directed to achieve the objective goals is initiated, directed, energized and maintained”. Butler and Rose (2011), defined the term motivation as the inspiration behind an activity, the course of a movement, and emotional feeling of an individual to make him achieve what he wants or make him want to achieve his expectations or personal needs. In recent literature, Osabiya (2015) defined motivation as “a driving force within people that makes them attempt something in order to achieve specific goals to fulfill their needs or expectations”.

The situation in the given case is similar to having a lack of motivation and that is the root cause behind all other conflicts among the employees of the accounting department in ABC service. Poor managerial skill of the last mangers worked in the finance department made this possible to increase this communication gap between the team-members (O’Neill, Sohal, & Teng, 2016). In order to apply an effective approach to resolve such conflicts roots cause of the conflict has to be found out to understand the problem. For all the conflicts in this scenario like low morale and lack of communication there may be different causes. Some of the common causes for such conflicts are wasted potential, poor employee treatment, unrecognised hard work, unreasonable workload, misunderstood or unclear expectation, high turnover rates, and many more (Swartout, Boykin, Dixon, & Ivanov, 2015). In this case the root cause identified for the low morale and other conflicts related to the employee behaviour is fund out to be the high turnover rates of the employees in the department. The high turnover rate of employees is making employees demotivated and pressurising them to focus on their job only. This is making them to work with more efficiency but at the same time they are feeling like they might face the same situation.

In order to resolve such conflicts there are different managerial approaches like classical management approach, behavioural approach, and modern approach. Among these approaches, for the given case scenario behavioural approach with effective managerial leadership of democratic style would be effective (Ramiah, Zhao, Moosa, & Graham, 2016). In behavioural management approach here are different styles to manage people under the managerial authority. Managers using this management approach generally use democratic leadership style which helps them to build a motivating confidence among their employees and make them work as a team.

Strategies for Managing Conflict and Improving Morale in the Workplace

A manager with such capabilities has a constant look on people with dull eyes and sagging shoulders (Chaudhry, and Asif, 2015). They identify such demotivated people into their team and inject efficient motivation to make them feel motivated and energizing for the work. This approach of dealing with people of different behaviour utilises democratic leadership style to manage them with much efficiency (Amanchukwu, Stanley, and Ololube, 2015). Democratic leadership involves each team member into every action of the group activities they perform in a group. Such practices of working in the group make employees more interactive with each other and communicate their thoughts with their teammates as well as their managers. Also when managers use this approach they get success in building a trust among their team members. Building this trust among team members will make it easier for me to manage my team-mates and resolve their conflicts. In this leadership employees are part of the decision making the process as well (Dziedzic, et al., 2015). This approach will make them understand their responsibilities more efficiently and make will bind them to interact with each other in a productive way. Also the communication of their thoughts and ideas to help me in making the right decisions will make them work in group. Through this process, they will be acting as a team and a haling behavior will originate among their workplace relationship. Under this management approach employees have to take an emotional interest in the success journey of their department as they are responsible to help their managers in crafting the departmental processes and policies (Scott, 2015).

Using this democratic approach I will be able to figure out and resolve most of the conflicts that my team-mates are having in the current scenario. This will help them to work together as a team along with providing a motivation of being a responsible person for departmental as well as organizational decision. Although they will not be making decisions directly, their involvement in the decision-making process will make them feel the same (Einarsen, Skogstad, Rørvik, Lande, and Nielsen, 2018). This motivation will generate a high-level energy into my team members. While dealing with my team-mates I will be making a deep understanding of their behaviour and will address the same to my CEO. This will make me to help the organization in resolving such conflicts from the other departments of the organization. This will show a positive gesture of mine towards the organization. Since, all the team members in working under my leadership are very proficient technically and giving an output meeting their role expectations. In such work and additional motivation that is provided to resolve their team-mate’s conflicts will also help in enhancing their work productivity. This increased productivity will help their individual performance as well as the organization in overall growth.

Under my management, every member of the team will be acting proactively as they will be assigned to new responsibilities and have to work in a group for their department instead of their individual performance. This will make them talk to each other at the workplace and interact on different concerns related to the work as well as their personal aspects (Kazimoto, 2013). Any other leadership will not give this much efficient output for the situation with which accounting department of ABC service is dealing.

Above discussion on the management of employees in a department makes it clear that people need motivation and right direction to work more efficiently. Motivation has been recognized as the key element to enhance efficiency as well as the productivity of an organization along with its employees’. Some workplace conflicts among employees may occur due to lack of efficient managing skills that need to be resolved at first. In this order, some effective leadership skills are required. These skills can be shown through a manager’s leadership style or approach they are using to deal with the situation. For different situations, different approaches are defined in the literature on business and management. In the given case, for me, democratic leadership will be most suitable and efficient approach to deal with the situation. A complete analysis of the approach done in this discussion supports the decision of using democratic leadership to deal with the situation. Also, the discussion makes it easier to understand the mechanism of democratic leadership to resolve all the motivational and managerial conflicts that the company employees were having into their professional behavior at the workplace.

References

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